‘Mad Men': Book of changes

We begin the episode with a frantic Ken Cosgrove trying to keep control of a speeding car full of drunk Chevy executives as they bray and wave guns around, which is harder to do than it sounds, especially when said drunk Chevy executives think it’s hilarious to cover the driver’s eyes. Screech of tires, flash of headlights and end visual metaphor for the entire episode.

Don is outside ur maid’s door, smokin’ cigarettes, litterin’.

We then join a frustrated Don and Ted and Roger and Harry Hamlin in the SCDPCGC conference room as they wait for Ken Cosgrove to return from Detroit. It seems Chevy has been shooting down all of SCDPCGC’s ideas, and everyone is cranky and exhausted and NO THEY ARE NOT GOING TO TAKE A NAP, HOW ABOUT YOU QUIT PLAYING CHECKERS AND SHUT UP, ROGER. Ken finally arrives on a cane, and promptly gets yelled at for not calling to say he was going to be late (except that he did call, and he did say he was going to be late because CAR CRASH, but Roger forgot to tell everyone because Roger). Ken explains that he’s got bad news and even more bad news: they are on a two-year track with Chevy, with multiple layers of bureaucracy, so this is whole business of sending new campaign ides every single week will be going on for a while. Even better, Chevy wants Ken back in Detroit with a new idea on Tuesday, so…

Ted is taken out of the meeting for a phone call, while Don pouts that he should be allowed to go with Ken to pitch their ideas because Ken’s obviously not getting the job done. Dawn then alerts Don that he has a phone call from Dr. Rosen and Don is all PANIC! PANIC! PANIC! Don first instructs her to take a message before curiosity gets the better of him, and he decides to take the call. “Good idea!” announces Harry Hamlin, “I’m going to call my doctor, too, and inject everyone with speedballs fix Ken Cosgrove and everyone else up!”

In his office, a sick to his stomach Don takes the call from Dr. Rosen, only discover that it’s actually Mrs. Rosen who just pwnd him. “And that’s why you don’t smoke cigarettes outside my door and leave butts all over the place for my husband to find and accuse me of taking up smoking again, seriously, QUIT IT WITH THE STALKING, DON.” Don worries that Mrs. Rosen is afraid of Dr. Rosen, and Mrs. Rosen is like, “You’re not hearing me, Don. The problem here is that if you have an affair with someone, you need to be able to trust them to not blow up your life when it ends, which is why it’s important to find someone who has just as much to lose as you do. And you’re not playing by those rules.” Mrs. Rosen starts crying and Don, being Don, tells her that he has a lot of feelings, too, and that he just wants to talk to her. “How about I hang up on you, instead! OKBAI,” says Mrs. Rosen. Don tantrums and throws the phone through his little office bar; which, you’re only hurting yourself, Don. Don alerts Dawn that he’s going to take a nap and have a self-pitying coughcry.

Which sends him tumbling into a whore house flashback.

Chinless Don Draper has a bad cough. Not!Mom orders him to sleep in the cellar, which I’m not certain is the best place to quarantine a nasty cough, but neither Not!Mom nor I are doctors, so what do we know. The point here is that what is important to Not!Mom is not so much Chinless Don Draper’s health, but the collective health of the ladies. Enjoy the cellar, Chinless Don Draper!

So, after a decent 2 1/2 hour nap, Dawn wakes Don up and sends him out to see Ted who is announcing to the office that Frank has, in fact, died. As such, Ted won’t be able to work with everyone else this weekend, sorry not sorry. And then Harry Hamlin makes his own announcement that while that’s all very sad, Dr. Feelgood is upstairs, so. And then he races the young noname creatives upstairs to get his happytimes on.

Upstairs, Ken, Stan and Stan’s Beard have all received their happytimes shots, and Harry Hamlin sends Don in for his. In the office, Dr. Feelgood asks Don if he has any health issues he should know about before ordering to drop trou for his happytimes shot. Don, pants half off, does manage to bother to ask what, exactly, is in the shot, and Dr. Feelgood explains that it’s a mixture of B vitamins and meth a stimulant. Into Don Draper’s perfect don goes the needle, all the while Dr Feelgood burbles about what the agency will call itself. As Don emerges from the office behappytimed, Roger heads in, warning Dr. Feelgood that he has a heart condition, but these concerns are waved off by Dr. Spaceman Feelgood because, pffft. (It should be noted that Roger then disappears for the remainder of the episode, having taken someone else to the hospital who was complaining of having heart issues — let’s just hope it’s not that our source is unreliable and it was Roger who needed to be taken in). Harry Hamlin, Stan and Stan’s Beard tear through the lobby in a footrace. Stan’s Beard wins. (Obviously.)

On his way downstairs, Don notices the sounds becoming echoier and louder, and is stopped in his drug-addled tracks at the sight of Peggy comforting Ted in his office.

Flashback! Chinless Don Draper is headed to the cellar with his bedroll when Prettiesh Prostitute invites him into her room. There, she listens to his breathing, declares it merely a bad cold, not consumption, and deflects Chinless Don Draper’s questions about a photograph of a baby on her vanity. Prettiesh Prostitute then tucks Chinless Don Draper into her bed, while tsking that his mother has no idea how to take care of him, and Chinless Don Draper corrects her: Not!Mom is not his mom.

Back in the present, High Don finds himself grinning goofily at Ted’s secretary, wondering if he knows her from somewhere. “Uh, duh, Mr. Draper?” Ted’s Secretary doesn’t say.

At the Francis household, Sally puts Baby Gene’s shoes on, and orders an exasperated Bobby to fetch the suitcase. A newly reblonded (and slimmer) Betty enters the kitchen, announces that she’ll be driving the children to Don’s, and compares Sally’s miniskirt to something a streetwalker would wear because 60s. Sally explains that she earned the skirt by babysitting the boys for Megan, and Betty is OUTRAGED. SALLY IS NOT A HIRED HAND. ALSO: OOH, THAT MEGAN. ~mentally shakes fist~

In the creative room, the creatives are throwing out Chevy ideas, including conversations between fathers and sons, and the poem “Annabel Lee,” because what says “Buy a Chevy” better than:

And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling- my darling- my life and my bride,
In the sepulchre there by the sea,
In her tomb by the sounding sea.

Pete walks through, and expresses his condolences on the loss of Frank, but High Creative Noname #1, is all, “Good riddance,” which offends Pete’s delicate sensibilities.

High Stan’s Beard throws out a few ideas: “Dad, I need a car for this date,” “Dad, everyone has a car but me,” “Dad, I need a car to go to college,” and Ginsberg interrupts with, “Dad, I could be dying in Vietnam,” which, aside from just being a terrible slogan for a car ad, throws High Stan’s Beard off its game.

Meanwhile, High Don is in his office, frantically tearing pages out of a magazine, when High Ken Cosgrove comes to visit him. High Don demands High Ken take him with him to Detroit, and in response, High Ken does a little tap dance to the tune of “It’s My Job,” a little song about how Ken Cosgrove is utterly powerless to the whims of the completely deranged Chevy executives.

Catchy, and you can dance to it! (http://jaw3.net/)

High Don asks High Ken where he learned to do that, and High Ken explains that his mother … WAIT, NO … his first girlfriend taught him, and with that, High Ken dancewalks his way home.

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The creatives are still tossing around terrible ideas in the creative room when High Don comes running around the corner to deliver an inspiring speech: “They all might be feeling the darkness today … but this process will not take years. We can not be defeated! There is an answer that will open the door! There is a way around this system. This is a test of their patience and commitment. One great idea can win someone over!” Peggy is all, “That’s all well and good, but do you have any clue what this idea is?” And High Don admits that he doesn’t, BUT HE SHAN’T STOP LOOKING! HUZZAH! Peggy sighs that she’s going to order dinner and High Don stomps away down the hall to have another flashback.

Prettiesh Prostitute feeds sick Chinless Don Draper soup.

And then High Don awakens the next morning in the same spot where he stopped to reminisce about soup the night before.

High Don returns to the creative room to discover Peggy and High Harry Hamlin back from the funeral, and everyone watching some hippie girl sitting in the middle of the room doing I Ching, which, sure. Hippie Girl tells High Don to ask a question in his mind, and as he stands there staring at her in a drug-induced stupor, she smiles beatifically, and says, “good.”

High Don turns his attention to Peggy, asking her to find a soup ad they did in ’58 or ’59. Ginsberg complains that High Don already asked him about this, and he looked in the archives but couldn’t find anything, but High Don ignores him. SOUP IS GOING TO CRACK THIS WHOLE THING WIDE OPEN! HUZZAH! And as High Don goes stomping out of the creative room again, Peggy glares at Harry Hamlin and the mess he’s made. INDEED, HARRY HAMLIN.

High Don goes back to his office sometime around dusk, and finds Hippie Girl waiting for him and the ice he promised to bring back for their drinks. High Don insists that she leave, he’s on deadline! But instead she takes out a stethoscope that she found upstairs? And tells him that his question was “Does anyone love me?” And she tries to listen to his heart? But it’s broken? High Don marvels that she can hear that, meaning that his heart is broken, but she just means the stethoscope and zomg, seriously, are we done with this middle school metaphor yet? We are? Good. Because it is TRYING MY LAST NERVE. High Don sends her on her way; goodbye, Hippie Girl.

High Don calls Megan to let her know that whoops, he’s high not coming home, too much work, sorry. Megan, who has plans to go to a play with her agent to meet some producers, is NOT AMUSED, but decides, whatever, she’ll just leave Sally in charge. KBAI, kids! Try not to get murderized by intruders!

Back in the creative room, the creatives decide to play William Tell.

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It ends with an Exacto knife in High Stan’s arm. High Stan’s Beard is otherwise unharmed.

Drunk Peggy takes High Stan and High Stan’s Beard back to their office to patch him up, where he gets handsy and kisses her, setting a thousand Steggy shippers on fire. Drunk Peggy accepts the kiss, before half-heartedly pushing away. She thinks of Stan and Stan’s Beard as a brother! She has an inappropriate crush on her boss a boyfriend! So High Stan and High Stan’s Beard pull out the big guns: his 20-year-old cousin was killed in Vietnam, and he has the sads. Drunk Peggy is very sorry, but High Stan needs to get his high hand off her thigh, it’s not happening. And with that, she leaves, suggesting that High Stan let himself feel the pain instead of trying to drown it with sex and drugs. High Stan’s Beard disagrees.

Meanwhile, in his actual apartment, Sally is reading a little Rosemary’s Baby, when she hears a noise from the living room and goes to investigate. There, she finds an older African-American lady rummaging around in her house and startles her. The woman explains that she’s Sally’s grandmother Ida, despite that being literally impossible. But Grandma Ida claims that she raised Sally’s father, Don Draper, and she’s going to make Sally some scrambled eggs. Sally still has a skeptical, until Grandma Ida asks Sally if her daddy is still handsome and if her momma is still a piece of work. Yes and yes! Grandma Ida must be the real deal because she sure knows what she’s talking about!

High Don is still high, and searches for that soup ad in the archives, and finds it! Except instead of “soup ad” it’s an “oatmeal ad” featuring a bebeautymarked mother warmly serving her young son a bowl of oatmeal, with the tag: “Because you know what he needs.” And what he needs is another flashback.

Chinless Don Draper wakes up in Prettiesh Prostitute’s bed (whose name is Amy, not the fancy Aimeé, she might have told him earlier, silly her), fever having broken. She asks him if he likes her beauty mark, and Chinless Don Draper being, what, 15? is like, Uh, sure? So then Prettiesh Prostitute climbs into bed with him and takes his virginity, obviously.

So Sally enjoys some scrambled eggs, because, hey! scrambled eggs! while Grandma Ida pokes around the house, filling her pockets and attempting to remove the television from of the wall. Bobby wakes up thanks to the television-stealing racket going on in the next room, and Grandma Ida has to explain, again, that she is their grandmother here to replace their father’s gold watch’s wristband, if only she knew where to find it … and so Bobby points her in the direction of all four of his father’s watches in the next room. While Grandma Ida is in the bedroom, Sally demonstrates that she’s not a complete idiot and tries to call the police only to have 1. the police not believe her because she’s a kid and 2. Grandma Ida catch her. Grandma Ida is VERY DISAPPOINTED and warns that she’s going out for some air, and when she returns they had BETTER BE IN BED. With that, Grandma Ida and at least 4 of Don’s watches leave the apartment, and Bobby turns on some television.

Back at the office, High Don Draper has had an oatmeal breakthrough, and is typing some nonsense about not shutting the door and history and GENIUS. High Don Draper screams for Peggy, who, along with Ginsberg come rushing into Don’s office hoping to hear something that will allow them to go home for the night. Instead, High Don shoves the oatmeal ad at them, announces that it “explains it all” and then begins rambling about this thing that draws people together, a history and how it’s “everything.” Don then begins yammering about the bargain of advertising, that it’s an exchange for free entertainment, but what happens if the audience grows bored with the entertainment? And Ginsberg! He’s getting it! You have to get your foot in the door! “But how do you capture her imagination?” High Don asks. “If I only have a sentence or two, how do I get her to listen?” Peggy, having been here before, is all, “Waaaaaait, who’s ‘her?'” But Ginsberg is still running with it: “Promise them everything, that it will take away their pain, that a Chevy is the answer to all their problems.” “No, it’s not,” High Don responds. And Peggy is all, “ZOMG, you haven’t been working on Chevy at all!”

High Don doesn’t give the most appropriate response:

but instead runs down the hallway and presumably all the way back to his apartment.

Peggy half-heartedly chases after him only to be stopped by Harry Hamlin who calls her over to peer into an office. There she sees Stan’s Beard having the sexytimes with Hippie Girl. “THAT’S IT,” Peggy declares, “I’M GOING HOME.”

High Don also goes home, muttering to himself his practiced speech about “not closing the door, not shutting the door” on him. Once inside, he’s faced with Megan and the children and Betty and Henry and a bunch of cops, and Betty is explaining that an elderly “negro” woman held their children hostage. The cops elaborate that Grandma Ida came in through the unlocked back door and apparently had robbed some of his neighbors, but that they caught a suspect, and Don will need to come ID some of his things. But Betty’s not done yelling at Don yet, outraged that her children were left alone while Megan was off on the casting couch and Don was wherever he tells everyone he is, “at work.” ALL T, ALL SHADE, BETTY. Bobby then explains to his father that Grandma Ida said she was his mother; Sally demands to go home; and Don, he passes out into another flashback.

Amy the Prettiesh Prostitute is yelling at Uncle Mac about something or other; the gist is, she’s being thrown out of the house. She demands $5 for taking Chinless Don Draper’s virginity, but instead, Uncle Mac throws her suitcase at her face. Not!Mom, upon hearing the news about Chinless Don’s deflowering, beats Chinless Don Draper with her spoon for being trash and a disgrace.

That night, Megan assures Soberish Don that she felt faint, too, and that she’s terribly sorry for having left the children alone — Sally seems grown-up, but is really just a kid still. Yep! Entirely your fault, Megan! BLAME CANADA! BLAME CANADA!

The next morning, Sober Don is riding down on the elevator, when Mrs. Rosen joins him. She asks him how he is, and with a curt, “busy,” Sober Don ends all conversation.

At the office, Sober Don calls Sally to assure her that he is perfectly healthy, just overworked. Sally explains that she wanted to go home because she was embarrassed, and Sober Don assures her that Grandma Ida fooled plenty of adults. Sally explains that she asked Grandma Ida plenty of questions, but that Grandma Ida had an answer for all of them, and that it made Sally realize that she didn’t really know anything about her father. With that, Sober Don assures Sally that he was the one who left the back door open: it’s all his fault.

Sober Don heads into Ted’s office, who is completely bewildered by the work produced over the weekend: it’s utter gibberish, and Chevy is misspelled. Also, ALSO, why did Harry Hamlin think it was a good idea to bring Frank’s little girl into the office? It’s revealed that Hippie Girl is Frank’s daughter, and Harry Hamlin thought that the office would be safer than the East Village, where she wanted to go.

Sober Don, done with these shenanigans, announces that he will limit his contribution to Chevy by being creative director, that’s all he is capable of doing, and that Ted should call him in 1970 when Chevy is ready to make an ad. Ted whines that he can’t do this alone, and Don spits back that every time they get a car, this place turns into whore house. Way to tie it altogether, Don! Well done!

Obviously, this is all a hallucination going through Ken Cosgrove’s mind in the moments between the squeal of the tires and when he dies, Jacob Ladder‘s style. (Whoops, 1990 spoiler alert.)

Except that doesn’t make any sense, as most of what happens, aside from Ken’s astonishing tap dance, happens to Don. Maybe instead, this is all a dream Don has when he lies down for a nap in his office? Believe it or not, I think there could be an argument for that, but Mad Men tends to be too literal for such writing trickery, so we won’t treat it as such.

So what do we make of this weird episode? The biggest piece to understanding this episode is that Don is conflating the Chevy account problem with his Mrs. Rosen problem with the very origins of all of his psycho-sexual issues. As is fairly obvious by the end of the episode, Don was never working on the Chevy account, but instead was creating a campaign to win Mrs. Rosen back, by applying everything he knows about advertising and the power of persuasion. What’s interesting to break down is how his subconscious takes him from Point A to Point Z. Let’s diagram it together, shall we?

At the beginning of the episode, Don Draper has two problems: 1. Mrs. Rosen has dumped him and 2. Chevy won’t accept the agency’s campaign ideas. Don Draper is convinced there is a simple and singular solution to both issues: Don just needs to talk to them. If Chevy and Mrs. Rosen would just listen to him, give him a few moments to plead his case, they’d obviously see the righteousness of his vision. Couple the weight of these problems with a nasty cough that Don has developed (no doubt from all his stalking/cigarette-smoking time), and Don is reminded of another time in his life when he was sick, how he was healed and how that particular problem was resolved. And thus, when Don is given this drug cocktail, the discrete borders in his mind that separate Mrs. Rosen from Chevy from his time growing up in the whore house are dissolved.

And he begins connecting the (beauty) dots: Amy the prostitute has a beauty mark on her cheek and fed Don soup just like the mother in the ad has a beauty mark on her cheek and fed her son oatmeal because she knows “what he needs” just like Mrs. Rosen has a beauty mark on her cheek. And if A = B and B = C, then Amy the prostitute, the woman who knew what Don needed = Mrs. Rosen.

Don’s mother-whore complex is the most mother-whore complex.

Clever Tumblr is clever (http://m90indra.tumblr.com/)

(Remember what I was saying about it all being part of a dream Don has? In my mind, the sequence above, cleverly mapped out by m90indra.tumblr.com, is the best argument for it — or at the very least for Ken’s entire jig being Don’s drug-induced hallucination. Either/or, really.)

Euphoric that he can win back Mrs. Rosen/Chevy/Amy by just asking them to open the door, Don comes home to be confronted by his wife, his ex-wife and the news that someone claiming to be his “mother” snuck into his house, menaced his children and stole from him, and it literally knocks Don down. Don comes to realize that in the end, the women who “know what he needs” (the woman who took his virginity, Mrs. Rosen, his biological mother) always leave him behind with the abusive mother-wife. The woman who stays is the woman who will hurt him — and that is the woman who Don ultimately believes he deserves.

And this is why, once sober, Don is able to disconnect from both Mrs. Rosen and working on the Chevy account in any capacity other than a removed one. He knows and has accepted that he can not win Mrs. Rosen back. And since he has tethered Mrs. Rosen to the Chevy campaign in his mind, A = B, and he comes to accept that he will not be able to convince Chevy of his grand ideas, either.

What’s interesting is the C story that plays underneath and mirrors Don’s, which we can call “Stan and Stan’s Beard’s Motif.” Stan, also on drugs, fires off a series of (rather mundane) ideas for Chevy before being stopped in his tracks by Ginsberg’s “Hey Dad, I could be dying in Vietnam” suggestion. The Vietnam suggestion lingers in Stan’s and Stan’s Beard’s head, and he attempts to mollify himself with sex with Peggy before finding solace in Hippie Girl. For Stan, like Don, sex is the answer, at least as to the question of “what will numb this exact pain right now.”

Speaking of Hippie Girl, the writers clearly wanted us to take notice of her using the I Ching. The I Ching, “The Book of Changes,” is an ancient classic Chinese text that contains a divination system, wherein one asks a question and then casts a series of hexagrams 6 times to come up with an answer. From Wikipedia: “During the Warring States Period, the text was re-interpreted as a system of cosmology and philosophy that subsequently became intrinsic to Chinese culture. It centered on the ideas of the dynamic balance of opposites, the evolution of events as a process, and acceptance of the inevitability of change.” As this site about the I Ching states:

[The I Ching] will show you how to move in harmony with the time:

This is the idea at the core of Taoism. It hardly seems revolutionary, but in fact it is quite different from how we usually live, often enslaved by habit that we are not even aware of, repeating old behaviours that were appropriate to some entirely different time and place, trapped in outdated views of our situation. If we can follow what fits with the time, resting when it is time to, then we move on more smoothly and strongly, borne along by natural forces rather than fighting against them.

The first episode of the season comes to a close on New Year’s Day 1968. That date was designed to set the tone for the entire season.

That year, says Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner, is, “as far as I can tell, in the top two or three worst years in U.S. history.”

“That’s what it was about for me,” he tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross. “Let’s get to the destruction. Let’s get to the loss. Let’s … express the idea that people want to change, and change is afoot. Because as far as I can tell, 1968 is a year about change, about revolution, about violence, about people turning inwards as community breaks down.

“So I really kind of wanted to get that into the personal story of Don, which is, ‘I don’t like the way I am.’ Where will that go?”

Weiner says that, just as 1968 was in some ways a low-water mark for the United States, he sees the year and this sixth season as Don’s darkest moment. The question at stake is how Don will or won’t make it through.

It’s fascinating that this episode comes on the heels of RFK’s assassination, which was not mentioned once in this episode, yet haunts everything within it. Death is lingering in every corner: Frank dies, Ken looks death in the face, and Stan is traumatized by his younger cousin’s death, making him realize his own mortality for the first time. Things fall apart. The centre can not hold.

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And as it is with the world, it is with Don. This episode was Don’s inward journey towards change: he’s desperate for that “history” that he claims binds people together, he clings to this relationship with Mrs. Rosen because it is what is familiar, comforting and what he understands. Don lingers outside Mrs. Rosen’s doorway, that metaphor for this entire episode, hoping that either she will choose to open the door and let him back in, or that it is forced open when Dr. Rosen confronts her about the mess Don has left literally and figuratively on their doorstep. He wants Mrs. Rosen to keep that door to the past open for him. He wants to remain a Janus, standing in the threshold, staring into the future and past all at once. But, like the historic events taking place all around them, Mrs. Rosen has closed that door to a bygone time. No one and nothing can return to how they were or it was before. The only door that is open is one that Don left unlocked in pursuit of his old habits, his old ways, and the only things that passed through it were danger and loss. It’s time to close the door to the past. It’s time to change. It’s time to move forward.

2 Responses

Awesome analysis. I’ve already read 5 or 6 thoughtful recaps of this episode and not one has come close to your breaking of the A=B B=C code and tying every chaotic thread together in a logical way. It actually makes sense now. Thank you!

Excellent drawing together of themes, T! Even better than the writers of ‘Mad Men’ this go around. This wasn’t my favorite episode as everything seemed shoehorned in to get Don to say that one line at the end. And do we really need to see Don go to his dark place some more? Hasn’t he been in a dark place for nearly a decade?

I can think of one dream sequence on ‘Mad Men’ – shoving the dead woman under the bed – but this just felt hallucinogenic in the moment. I didn’t care for it as a method to force us to watch Don’t younger no-chin self nor did I get much more characterization out of Don’s flashbacks. It’s just an empty well at this point. Please let Don move forward.